Monday, March 28, 2011

BUFF weekend review

The Boston Underground Film Festival is now offering a "Recession Special" pass for $35! This will get you into all the remaining festival film screenings at the Kendall Square theater all day thru Thursday, March 31. Well worth it if you can find four movies you're into in the next four days (or two or three and feel like supporting the festival w the difference! =).

From the films I caught this weekend, I'd recommend to EVERYONE (who can handle a little violence and weirdness w their drama, it *IS* the BUFF, after all)...

CHOPtrailer | BUFFA tongue-in-cheek (but surprisingly, not literally so) take on the revenge drama. Think the setup of OLD BOY with the colliding worlds, tone change-ups, and even some of the pop culture droppings of PULP FICTION.

PHASE 7trailer | BUFFA smart and matter-of-factly done wink-and-a-nod what-if drama that unfolds in an apartment building that is quarantined to protect the public from a possible superflu/virus outbreak. After a couple of hours, neighbors give each other dirty looks when one of them coughs or sneezes. A day or so later, they are reluctant to help each other out with a spare this or that. And after a week, that persistent cough might as well be a WMD and the contents of one's medicine cabinet and cupboards become very valuable. Wacky fun ensues! A clever cousin to the likes of [REC]. Subtitled, from Argentina.

THE BEAST PAGEANTtrailer | BUFF | musicThis is the trippiest of my recommendations, but I have to push it cuz of its beautiful, somewhat fried, whimsy and darkness. It starts in a BRAZIL-ian dystopian near-future, man as cog in machine. Then it visits dreamlands probably bordering ERASERHEAD. When the film, and the main character, finally embrace these detours into the weird, they escape into a musical vision quest somewhere between EL TOPO and AMERICAN ASTRONAUT.

Hrmm... That probably doesn't mean a lot to most of you, eh? Well, please have a look at the listing and the trailer and then decide to take a chance on it anyway. =)

A couple of niche-ier conditional recommendations...

THE CORRIDORtrailer | BUFF | my rambleA pretty solid slow burn of a psycho-sci-fi flick. The monsters in this film are of the glassy-eyed, not bug-eyed, type. They're a group of lifelong friends, getting together for a reunion weekend of male bonding... who happen to encounter an otherworldly phenom in the snowy woods, an energy field in the shape of a corridor, a corridor that grows as it apparently lures more and more people into itself.

The film reminds me a lot of DREAMCATCHER in setup and tone, but goes somewhere a bit more personal with the conflict. Note that the director (or was he the writer, sorry, I'm not sure now) explained that this is a not-quite-final cut, as there is still post-production work to be completed.

If you find yourself pondering any of the short film programs, I saw ILLUSTRATED ODDITIES (a wide variety of subjects, all delivered in animated style) and FUTURE IMPERFECT (weird glimpses into the dark present and apocal-a-future), and between the two, FUTURE has more better-crafted executions of compelling concepts and stories. Alas, the FUTURE films play again this afternoon, foo, while ODDITIES screens on Thursday at 5:45. I kinda wish that I'd caught the OMFG LMFAO program, which ran head-to-head against the animation. O well.